Thursday, November 24, 2011

Metrics and analytics are easily available to marketers today. They have changed the way marketing is done. We measure almost every aspect of sales and marketing data - from costs per lead / opportunity / deal to conversion rates / times, as well as details of each marketing and sales campaign.

It is not a secret that often organic search-generated leads are among the best from the cost-efficiency and conversion perspective. Naturally, many marketing organizations work on increasing these by SEO and other means. It is a process of trial and error, where you change one variable at a time and measure the outcome.

In this process, Google Analytics has been a great tool. It was great to know the keywords prospects find you by. Furthermore, you could study the customer behavior for each keyword, identifying the best keyword phrases and improving messaging, marketing programs and sales tools. Everybody won - prospects got relevant content / products; search engines provided better results; vendors got better leads.

Well, that all changed a few weeks ago, when Google decided to "mask" searches from people who are logged in a Google service, such as Google Docs or Google+. Instead of seeing results for specific searches by these folks, now we see just "Not Provided." This makes major elements of SEO analytics useless. And if you are marketing to SMB It, where a large percentage is using some kind of a Google product, about 30-40% of your searches fall in "Not Provided" category.

This is very un-Google like. I hope Google figures out a way around this problem. And AdWords is not the answer, because there is a big difference in buying behavior of people who are clicking on paid search vs. organic search links. But for now, "Not Provided" is our new reality.

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

This post is the continuation from 8 Key Elements for SMB Marketing (Part 1).In this entry, I would like to focus on effective lead generation and nurturing practices, sales tools, as well as an integrated sales and marketing approach.

Lead Generation.With small deal sizes and large number of customers, enterprise-style 1:1 marketing is usually ineffective. Instead, I have seen great results with marketing into communities, such as Spiceworks. Many IT professionals from SMBs use such communities to exchange ideas, to learn about new offerings and ask questions to peers. It is important to identify and establish presence in these communities - engaging participants, answering questions, working with customers and prospects, as well as running cost-effective marketing campaigns.

Another very effective way for generating high quality leads is creating unique and relevant content. You can use it for blogs, IT community posts, social media, and PR. In my experience, this has been one of the most cost-effective and sustainable sources of strong leads with very high conversion rates.

A lot has been said about the importance of PPC and SEO. I usually like to experiment with PPC for SEO messaging before putting lots of effort into SEO. This way I can get good results from a small PPC effort short-term, while SEO is gaining strength. Once SEO is strong, I still keep a small budget for PPC for experimenting with new keywords, ideas and marketing messages.

Call center lead generation campaigns can work well for certain offerings. However, to make these campaigns successful, there is typically a sizable upfront time and money investment - finding the right vendor, creating training materials and scripts, training agents, listening to calls and having an ongoing QA process.

One huge benefit of listening to lead generation and sales calls is the ability to witness your marketing and sales messages in action, see what works and what not, change as necessary and try again in real time.

Lead sorting and nurturing. With thousands leads from different sources and at different stages of buying cycle, it is virtually impossible to keep up with all of them manually. I have had success with designing a "funneling logic" for lead nurturing, where the leads get identified and categorized based on various factors and how far down are they in the sales funnel. Some types of leads get matured and closed using online tools (landing pages, content, emails, online store, chat, etc.) with minimal human interaction, saving sales lots of time. Other types get passed to the sales team for closing.

I have been using Marketo for lead nurturing. However, we quickly ran into the need to customize landing pages for further lead nurturing and "heating" to drive prospects closer to the purchase decision before handing them to the sales team.

Marketing and Sales Tools. I try to have a minimal set of marketing collateral with an emphasis on online tools, especially for cloud-based services. Many SMB IT folks don't have time to read through complicated materials. They prefer seeing and experiencing the actual product. Tools like screenshots and sandbox environments have been extremely useful for me, providing very high conversion rates. I also use podcasts, brief videos, blogs, datasheets, customer testimonials, and industry press articles as necessary.

Patience. With all these elements built properly, SMB sales can indeed be lucrative. However, these efforts require a dedicated team that is experienced in marketing and selling into this space, willing to stay engaged and transform along with the industry.

It also may take some time to get the messaging and programs right, people trained, see what works and what not in your environment, before you can start seeing results. However, the results can be great in terms of a strong revenue stream, high customer satisfaction rates and lower marketing costs.

Monday, August 15, 2011

Mysterious SMB market. For many years, I have been hearing the same story, "SMB market is lucrative and really fragmented. It represents a tremendous opportunity for us." Yet, I have witnessed many companies enter this space over and over, just to fall short of their expectations. So, what gives?

The challenge is that neither enterprise, nor consumer programs alone are effective in this market. I spent last 1,5 years on finding effective approaches for marketing and selling IT products and services into SMB. Here are my findings:

1. Market Definition. First, how do you define SMB? I break it down into 4 segments:

2. Analyzing Strengths. If you already have presence in this space and analyze your historic sales, you probably will discover that sales have been coming from one or two of the sub-segments above. This exercise will point to success in certain types of your activities or channels. And, visa versa, you may see opportunities in sub-segments that are not performing well. You can also define which of these sub-segments are best matched for your product / sales force / channel presence. This is critical, because even if you have the best product, but lack the right sales force type, your efforts may stumble.

3. Different Target Audience. IT folks in SMB find, purchase and consume products differently than their peers in large enterprises. SMB IT employees are typically generalists. Having to compete with much larger companies, IT departments with only a few people have to take care of everything from fixing computers to maintaining the network infrastructure and deploying applications. This often means no time for a deep dive into any area. This also means no time to read fancy white papers, or try every product feature, or attend industry IT mega shows. These characteristics make enterprise-type marketing fairly ineffective.

4. Product Approach. Ease of use is the name of the game here. I have seen many simple and easy-to-use cloud services beat out complex, difficult-to-use and deploy, yet feature-rich products. When building a product or a service for SMB market, it is critical to keep ease of use in mind. It is a somewhat difficult concept for enterprise software vendors, who customize products to the needs of very large customers. For these vendors, it may make sense to have a simpler and cheaper offering with reduced functionality that is easy to use, fast to deploy and doesn't require lots of support. That is one of the reasons behind success of many cloud services in SMB space. It is a worthwhile exercise for product managers, especially the ones with little SMB experience, to hold several focus groups to understand the simplicity requirements.

5. Messaging.Since simplicity is so important, most of the enterprise (complicated and long) messaging approaches won't work. SMB IT folks have absolutely no time to translate complicated technology of fluffy marketing messages into benefits. Product Marketing has to create a message that connects quickly and uses their target market's language. The reward can be huge - quick decision-making process and faster time to revenue. A successful example of such messaging is what we did for Panda Security: www.forgetsecurity.com

More...Not to bore you with too long of a post, I broke it down in two entries. In the second part, I discuss lead generation, lead sorting and nurturing, sales approach and channels, and marketing / sales tools.

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Twitter: Waste of Time or a Business Tool?
I used to think that Twitter represented no significant value for business needs. Just to be familiar with it, I opened an account a while ago, and tweeted here and there.

That all changed as I began working on a startup, developing a technology to prevent cyberbullying. In that process, I discovered very effective ways of using Twitter as a practical tool for market research.

Challenge
Many business executives, product managers, marketing professionals and sales reps find it hard keeping up with industry news, competitive info and market trends. Even though there are plenty of tools, keeping up with the news still requires hours of finding, sorting and reading articles. People are usually busy with tens of different tasks, leaving market research as something that often gets pushed down in priority.

Enter Twitter
There are armies of people who are tirelessly tweeting 24 hours a day. Tweets are brief. It takes less than a minute for us to determine if they are useful or not. We can use Twitter as tool to quickly get up to speed with the relevant news, spending just 5-10 min a day. Here is how I do it:

1. Create a Twitter accountthat contains the words of the main business problem you are trying to solve. In my case, it has "Cyberbullying" in it. This will be useful later, when you would want to use Twitter for marketing needs.

2. Find people tweeting on the subject of your interest. You can use the search bar for that. Play with multiple keywords to get the content you want. Then check profiles of people you found and make sure they fit your needs.

4. Get a mobile app. It may be easier to get quick updates on an iPhone or Android. I am using TweetCaster on Android. It gives me updates in a very easy format. It takes me only 5-10 min to go through the daily news. I often discover news before they show up in RSS feeds or other major news sources and tools. The most relevant ones get lots of retweets from many people. It is sort of "crowd voting."

5. Trim your list. As you are finding people who are tweeting irrelevant things for whatever reasons, unfollow them, until you have a "golden list" of sources that bring you the best quality news.

6. Check few times a day for 3-5 minutes each time and you will be abreast of the latest industry news.

7. Augment this with your more in-depth research from various sources when you have time.

That's it!
In military terms, Twitter became my Special Forces team for getting the dirty job done quickly and effectively. Other tools are like my regular military units for thorough, longer-term type projects.

Friday, August 5, 2011

It's a familiar situation. A company or division is formed. It develops a product, then races to launch. Somebody throws together an initial message and a web site. Product launches. Revenue starts flowing.

It's time to hire a marketing exec and build a team. Founders emphasize leads and conversion rates. Good things like SEO, lead nurturing, online marketing get implemented. But one fundamental is often missing.

Sin #1. Positioning / Main message. Let's look at the main message from two companies web sites:

- Zoho

- Workday

Are these accurate and good in the eyes of these companies? Probably.Is this the way their customers think? Probably not.Do these miss a chance to communicate the true value? Yes!

A strong main messages gives the best opportunity to grab prospect's attention... the right way. It also flows into the rest of messaging, impacting PPC, SEO and the conversion rate. In fact, vague main message results in wasted money and ineffectiveness of marketing campaigns. This is especially painful for startups with little brand recognition.

How do you develop a strong main message? Here are some key principles:

1. Grab attention.It has to be unique enough to grab visitors attention and encourage further browsing.2. Differentiate. Has to communicate at least one unique angle or a customer benefit.3. Specific. The benefit has to be specific. Statements like having "all-in-one," "complete," "best" are often subjective and indicate vendor's point of view. In the examples above, the word "complete" may have a very different meaning for target customers vs. the vendor. It can discredit the message. What I like about the message from AppAssure is that is specific. "Recover in Minutes" sets a pretty specific expectation.4. Believable.It is important to keep the balance between reality and outrageous statements that prospects discount as zealous or exaggerated.5. Language. The message has to be in the language used by target customers, which is often different from the vendor's language. If your target customer is CIO, too technical of a message may be a mistake. If you are targeting sysadmins, you may want to be fairly technical and specific.6. Easily understandable. The prospect has to be able to quickly grasp the message. Don't make them think too long - often people don't have time or desire to do that. They will just leave the site.7. Customer tested.It is critical to test the main message with a number of customers and prospects before going live. You can start with a qualitative test via customer conversations. Then, you can finish with an online survey.8. Not Perfect. It doesn't have to be perfect. You don't have to spend months on this. It OK for some internal folks to struggle with it. It can be work in progress, however you don't want to change it very often. It just has to be effective.

To summarize, a strong main message could drastically increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and ROI of your marketing spending. I will discuss the sin #2 in the next Hack Marketing blog entry.

Sunday, July 31, 2011

My friend George owns a mega insurance brokerage, as well as a ridiculous number of apartment buildings in LA. His success formula is very simple: "I never sell, I help people buy."

His agents are probably the most relaxed group of sales people I have ever met. They never "close hard." Instead, they spend time understanding prospects' needs, then explain why certain plans would work better. The conversion ratio is very high. So is his referral business. Below are my recommendations on applying this principle to online content strategy execution:

1. Great Content. Create relevant and interesting content that helps prospects understanding and solving their challenges. Brief, interesting articles / blog entries several times a week can help transforming your site into an industry "water cooler," where people can find news and practical information on their challenges and the ways to solve them.

3. "Non-marketing Articles". Find a specific challenge that your market really cares about and your products help to solve. Write about this challenge and best practices for solving it. Then talk about the approach your company took to solving it and why. This should be an "approach discussion," and not a product pitch. Not mentioning the product name often is a good idea at this stage. At the end of the article, you can provide a link to solutions and tools. That link will lead to a landing page with product info and a call to action. This way your article is credible, interesting, and actionable. And it is not pushing products.

4. Landing Page. The landing page picks up the discussion and shows how your product or service solves this specific problem in details. Later, you can add other features that you think the reader may find interesting. Finish the page with a call to action, such as a free trial, purchasing options, etc.

5. Promote The Content. Since the article is fairly neutral and is not talking about products, you can promote it at industry communities, social media and forums, generating a lot of traffic to your web site that you can turn into leads, opportunities and sales.

To summarize, with this approach your prospects are learning more about their challenges, ways to solve them. Once they decided on buying your product, they feel like they are making a purchase decision vs. somebody forcing them into buying something they may not need, understand or may not be ready to buy. So, they are more enthusiastic and excited about their decisions and your products they are buying.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Congratulations! Your web traffic is good! Now what? How do you convert visitors into business? The 5 approaches below came as a result of my own experience of running marketing in several companies, as well as from the practical feedback from my marketing colleagues.

1. Understand your traffic. Most likely your web traffic is coming from many different sources. For example, some people may be visiting your site as a result of reading a blog; some - from a banner ad at a community forum; some may be responding to an email. Each traffic type has unique characteristics that are important to understand:

Function. IT Manager vs. CIO vs. BU Manager, etc.

Buying cycle. Research phase (traffic source: just read a magazine article, realized had the same challenge) vs. shopping for a solution (source: read a customer testimonial at an industry forum while looking for a solution to a known problem) vs. ready to buy (source: responding to a price promotion.)

Topic / Trigger. Visitors came to the web site after reading a blog entry on a nasty Trojan Horse vs. an article about disaster recovery vs. a promotion on your product, etc.

For example, let's say you have a group of IT managers that came to your web site as a result of reading a blog entry on the complexity of managing file servers. Sending them to the main page may disrupt that conversation. Most of them may feel tricked and will probably end up leaving. Instead, a simple landing page continuing the discussion, perhaps explaining how this complexity can be solved with a practical implementation, would retain them and encourage to continue exploring the site.

It is important to have as many landing pages as necessary for a meaningful traffic segmentation (based on unique types of conversations) and driving them to a logical conclusion (more info, trial, contact, purchase, etc.) Many content management and marketing automation tools (like Marketo,) can help in accomplishing this quickly and easily.

3. Unique messages. Each landing page requires a specific message to continue the unique conversation started at the lead generation phase. The message should take into account all the factors from above.

For example, if visitors are coming as a result of reading an article on the risk management in CIO Magazine, you want a landing page with an "executive" look and feel, focused on best practices for solving this problem, and not getting into too many technical details. It is also a good practice to speak to several of your CIO customers to craft this message.

For a number of webmasters coming from a blog entry on solving Apache web server performance issues, you may want to have a landing page that is be fairly technical and specific. Again, I would suggest talking to a couple of webmaster customers to craft the message.

Each landing page needs the elements that are appropriate for its audience. The best way to find right elements is to talk to your existing customers fitting the profile. This can be an eye opening experience.

For example, one of my customers told me that most of the elements we were planning were irrelevant for him. He told us that many SMB IT Managers typically look for product screenshots first. If they like them, they continue browsing. After verifying this point with a few other customers with the same profile, we ended up giving screenshots a very prominent position on the page. Very quickly it became the most visited element for the whole site. The landing page ended up having a great conversion rate.

Another very successful element we added as a result of a direct customer feedback was a "sandbox" for a cloud product we were marketing, where IT managers could play with the product in a "sandbox" environment.

5. Unique call to action.For this step, it is important to understand prospects' phase in the buying cycle. If they are just researching, a big red "BUY NOW" button will most likely turn them off. However, "watch a video" or a "free trial" may work well for them. Alternatively, if the traffic is coming as a response to your "30% off" promotion, you may want to have the "buy" button in a more prominent location.

These are just 5 ways of increasing your web site conversion rates. These steps require a bit more planning and execution from your marketing team than usual. However the conversion rates and revenue results are well worth it.

There are important steps like monitoring, measuring, and adjusting pages and campaigns that I did not discuss in this entry. I will try to cover these in a future hack marketing blog entry.

Please feel free to leave your comments and suggestions of other conversion approaches that have worked for you.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Microsoft has been suspiciously absent from the whole social networking game. That is very much unlike them. There are several trends that should drive Microsoft to drastic steps in establishing strong presence in social networking space... fast.

1. Windows OS is becoming less and less essential with the emergence of Apple, tablets, and smartphones. More and more businesses are using MacBooks instead of PCs; Apple is winning in the tablet space; Windows is way behind in mobile devices, dominated by iPhone and Android.

2. Office is becoming less relevant too with the emergence of Google Docs and similar free or low cost cloud-based services. Yes, many of these services lack all fancy Office features, but majority of people never use them anyway.

3. Internet users arebecoming less aware of Microsoft too. IE is being pushed by Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Bing is interesting, but not dominant. Microsoft created a lot of hype on its cloud, but Azure or their other offerings are not dominant - neither in business space, not in consumer.

4. "VOS". Daily communications are steadily moving to social networks, both on personal and business levels. Email is moving to the cloud. A lot of personal applications are moving to mobile devices and social networks - consumers complete micro-purchases on AppStore, Android Market, Facebook credits for games, etc. Business apps are moving to the cloud, making the client OS unimportant.

To summarize, Social Networks are becoming the center of consumer computing experience, sort of a "virtual consumer OS." And all they require are a computing hardware, a browser and an Internet connection. Microsoft is not dominant in any of these areas.

Google is steadily taking over the "Virtual OS" space. This has to be a mortal threat to Microsoft. It has to worry Microsoft. The questions is, "what is Microsoft doing about it?" Well, for starters there was recently a "leak" on that subject.

But Microsoft today is not the same fighting machine it used to be. During the last two decades, Microsoft was a staple of computing. Competing against them was never a good experience. It got quite a few companies and industries destroyed. However, Microsoft went from being an innovator that revolutionized computing to a competition destruction machine to a somewhat civilized corporation to a huge company that is becoming too slow, unfocused, decentralized and stuck in the past.

On the other side, it still has lots of money, really good talent (I know quite a few amazing professionals there) and a huge presence both in the consumer and business space. I would use that as entry point for its social platforms.

DISCLAIMER! Back seat driver perspective. I would start with Outlook. Why not create a native and rich Web UI for Outlook that would integrate really nicely with Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+? It would transform into a web app that provides business users with an integrated and seamless communication experience that includes email, social networks and documents creation / cloud storage / sharing. Since many corporate users still "have to" use Outlook, this would benefit them in a way of simplicity - they wouldn't need to switch between applications and services. It would also benefit Microsoft by making Outlook "stickier" and increasing the usage of IE and Office.

Microsoft could also create a light version of it for consumers. Do I dare to say a "free," or a "freemium" version for less technology-savvy consumers (that don't buy MS Office anyway, so not much will be cannibalized.) This would become a gateway to social / cloud experience. Maybe even as a part of Windows UI in the future. Having lots of interesting components, Microsoft could offer certain nice to have components as upgrades. For example, from a free cloud word processor or a MS Word in the cloud.

Then I would grow the business by M&A. LinkedIn could be an interesting target to build on the business space.

Of course, this is me thinking out loud. There are many smart folks at Microsoft that may be working on similar functionality as I am writing this. It is never that easy for a large corporation to switch gears in a dramatic way. But soon Microsoft will have to make a drastic move or risk becoming a dinosaur.

Monday, July 18, 2011

The "good enough" concept is valid and important in many areas, including product management. There is never a perfect product, so a good product manager knows when the product is "good enough" and ready. This is based on many factors, such as customer feedback, quality, R&D reality, roadmaps, competitive data, etc. This subject is taught in Pragmatic Marketing and is widely used in most PM organizations today.

But does this principle work in other marketing areas? Not in my experience. For example, the difference between "good enough" and great for PPC and SEO is drastic. Lots of PPC campaigns never work and exec teams stop believing in these as valid lead gen tools because marketing never puts the right level of effort on finding out what are the exact keywords their prospects use at different buying stages, from the research to purchase. This is not an easy process. And good enough usually = failure. This is where you use "Hack Marketing" to find the right keywords. The results of these extra steps are the difference between success and failure of PPC and SEO.

The same goes with the rest of messaging. It really pays to conduct research and understand what are the exact words customers and prospects use. There is no "good enough" here. For example, we changed one word describing how the product category is referred based on customer feedback. Lead gen campaign results shot up 67% in one week.

Finally, "good enough" marketing materials in my experience are useless. I rather have a great web site with all the right messaging and use it as the major marketing tool instead of tens of mediocre white papers just because it is "the right thing to do" and "everybody does it."

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Google+ means duopoly. Facebook's honeymoon is over. It has a real competitor now. The "social media" industry took another step to its maturity. It is now Google+ vs. Facebook. Just like Microsoft vs. Apple. Or Toyota vs. Honda. USA vs. USSR.

Google+ can put an end to the fragmentation in social networks. Until now, we had Facebook for personal connections and LinkedIn for professional ones. And most people have been separating personal and business contacts.

Google+ allows combining all your contacts in one place, organized in various "circles", like family, friends, soccer teammates, fraternity buddies, security community, blog audiences, etc. Then you can communicate with all these circles from one command and control center.

Google+ gives us a new way to simplify and unite connections, social networking, as well as conducting business, e.g. creating user communities, doing research, managing forums, blogs, etc. It also becomes another way to market - reach target markets, customers, partners, communicate with remote teams, generate leads / demand.

Given Google+ adoption rate stays high, it would be critical for business and marketing professionals embracing and using it. The exciting part is that it gives new and creative ways of reaching our audiences, which can turn into a competitive advantage for early adopters.

Here is an example I just found on a web site of a well known vendor. "...(product) is the foundation for the CIO's and IT leadership team's performance system. It features a cascaded optimization system, the industry's deepest and broadest insight into IT-controlled assets, and a secure, comprehensive, operational environment for a hybrid world."

What? A "hybrid world?" Wasted words. I counted 19 words that are just fluff and mean nothing. Wasted space. Wasted time and budgets. There are better and more practical ways of writing marketing materials that people understand and read. My suggestions are below:

1. Know your audience. Understand who exactly is your audience. Which industry? What is the main function of your target reader? What are their pressures and challenges? What are their titles and reporting structures? Their internal customers. Demographics. Internal politics, etc.

2. Understand the lingo your audience uses. Talk to your customers directly. Ask how are they using your product. Don't assume you know the words they use. For example, you would fail if you used "IT words" with process engineers in Electric Power companies. When marketing cyber security to Power and Energy, we had to change about 80% of our marketing materials. But the results were amazing - almost every IT department we contacted, wanted to talk to us. Even at the meetings, we were treated like peers rather than vendors.

3. Simplify. Read what you wrote out loud. Pretend you are presenting in person to your target audience. Keep on rewriting until the text flows easily and you would have no problem verbally presenting it.

4. Be brief. Less is more. Remember, the goal of most marketing materials is not to close the deal, but rather get the prospect interested enough to contact sales or try the product. Longer texts tend to discourage busy viewers from reading.

5. Avoid fluff. Avoid generic words, like flexible or leverage. Try quantifying or using proof points. For example, "the industry's deepest and broadest insight into IT-controlled assets" is fluff. However, something like, "a system covering 95% of the industry's IT-controlled assets" is much more credible and easier to understand.

6. Test. Most of us, marketers, don't work in the functional area of our target buyers. It may be a good idea to test the text with your target audience. This can be a very revealing exercise. In my experience, this step has revealed some gems that turned into new marketing tools and lead generation approaches that we never knew existed. For example, from our customer conversations we discovered an IT community called Spiceworks, that turned out to be one of the best lead generation sources for SMB markets.